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Quick Read

Verdict: Although technically sound, the product is a bit pricey and suffers from some quality issues.

Rating Breakdown

SC Lab Reviews

Reviews from our expert team

Features:

Documentation:

Value for Money:

Performance:

Support:

Ease of Use:

4/5

Summary

Secuware Security Frame­work 4.0 is a directory ser­vice integrated product that contains a server and client soft­ware app used to manage whole disk or file/folder encryption poli­cies. The server component installs using many common LDAP-integrated directory services. Clients are managed from either a standalone local policy or domain policy that is pushed down from the central directory service.

From a technical perspective, Secuware does a great job of explaining the granular technical details of its features, including pre-boot authentication, mul­tifactor support, and its overall approach and methodology to cryptography. This includes lock­ing down peripheral devices, as well as the entire hard disk, using Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) 256-bit encryption. This is definitely a strong point.

During our testing, we noticed that we were not able to remove or uninstall the client software from our endpoints. Even from a centralized server perspec­tive, the ability to remove client components was notably absent. Secuware informed us that this is only provided to the client if they require it. We were sent a diff erent client component that contained a method for removal once we requested it. Also, we did not see any monitoring features that allowed us to actually verify if a policy or configuration was pushed down to an object. Therefore, we were not able to see the progress associated with encrypting a drive, or how long it took.

Although documentation was provided and was helpful in a general sense, we found a few translation issues in converting the documentation and the soft­ware into English.

From a support perspective, we were unsure what was included. However, Secuware does off er 24/7 support as an option.

Pricing is $144 per seat for up to 100 seats, and volume pricing for 501-1,000 seats is $84 per seat. The administration console is available at an additional charge of $5,000. We found this to be high given the unpolished nature of the product.